I'm severely hearing-impaired and grew up hacking devices so I could use them (mostly involving the addition of blinky lights). If anyone here needs to get in touch with specialists/accessibility folk experienced with working with deaf kids, I can probably hook you up (and will try to pull a few into the list).
<br><br>Note that making transcriptions/translations of audio/video/pictorial stuff available in plaintext format makes it easy for us to help both visually and auditorily impaired students as well as students who speak/read a different language.
<br><br>Is anyone writing a section or companion to [[OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines]] for accessibility? If not, it might be a good thing to start.<br><br>Is there a class of engineering students somewhere that might be persuaded to take on disability access for their capstone project, and/or some (older - early teens or adults, for more useful verbal feedback) folks with disabilities we might be able to recruit as testers and initial people to design directly for? I'd be happy to serve as a guinea pig for any hacks people come up with for the deaf.
<br><br>-Mel<br><br> by <br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Jan 8, 2008 3:03 PM, Seth Woodworth <<a href="mailto:seth@isforinsects.com">seth@isforinsects.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<br>All of the audiobooks from Librivox that are going to be included on the XO will have the corresponding text in the same package. It's a trivial matter to connect those two with some html, as the current content archive standard calls for.
<br><br>I agree with your comments otherwise, and I think that if OLPC isn't meeting those requirements it's a matter of 'not yet' rather than 'not ever'.<br><br>Accessibility is still pretty new and unfinished on the XO.
<div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Jan 8, 2008 11:16 AM, <<a href="mailto:ashettle@patriot.net" target="_blank">ashettle@patriot.net</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Albert Calahan said: "For a long time now, I've thought that accessibility<br>adaptations are kind of the wrong approach. That means trying to use audio<br>to describe video, when the video is trying to describe some abstract
<br>internal state. Ideally one would skip the middle-man, going straight from<br>the internal abstract state to the audio."<br><br>When making adaptations or modifications to make the standard XO more<br>usable by students with one disability (in this case, blind children), it
<br>is important to make sure we don't then make it less usable for students<br>with another disability. Deaf students would obviously be unable to<br>access material offered purely in audio format.<br><br>It does make sense to have a way to turn off the screen for a student who
<br>will never be looking at the screen anyway (e.g., because they're blind).<br>And maybe a way to shut off audio for students who will never be using<br>that. And it also does make sense to look at more innovative, creative
<br>ways of presenting information that is more inclusive of a wider number of<br>students who have very different learning strengths and weaknesses from<br>each other: if audio genuinely works better for a particular content, sure
<br>go with that, then put in captions or a transcript or a video in whatever<br>local signed language is used in a given country to make it accessible to<br>deaf students. I'm just raising this general point because sometimes I've
<br>seen people get so focused on making something accessible to one<br>disability group who happens to be more visible to them (maybe they're the<br>group who spoke out more, for instance) that they end up introducing
<br>features that exclude others.<br><br>A somewhat separate point re, video versus audio etc.: Do bear in mind<br>that even non-disabled children will have a wide diversity in how their<br>brains are wired to process new information and ideas. Some students just
<br>naturally learn better when they HEAR new information: show it to them<br>visually and they just won't absorb it even if nothing's wrong with their<br>vision. But other students just naturally learn better if they SEE new
<br>information: hearing it just isn't enough, even if they can hear<br>perfectly. Still other students need to be physically moving and learning<br>things through the motion of their body. And so forth. So it's never a
<br>good idea to assume that all educational material should be converted to<br>serve a single modality of learning because there would then be many<br>students who are left behind wheter or not they're disabled.<br>
<br>
Or if I've misinterpreted or misunderstood please elucidate.<br><br>Do we have any educational/pedalogy specialists on this list? This is not<br>really my field--just stuff I've read a bit here and there. Would be a
<br>nice complement for this list I would think.<br><br>Thanks,<br><br>Andrea Shettle, MSW<br><a href="mailto:ashettle@patriot.net" target="_blank">ashettle@patriot.net</a><br><a href="http://wecando.wordpress.com" target="_blank">
http://wecando.wordpress.com
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